The Lion kings

This month the British and Irish Lions go to South Africa for one of the toughest series in rugby union. But 35 years ago, the team went to the country under very different conditions. Speaking to the key players, and featuring unseen photographs, OSM recreates the amazing story of the side that broke down barriers, stayed out all night, and savaged the Springboks. It was the greatest rugby tour ever

In early May, 1974, Willie John McBride, a big-boned farming man from Ballymena in Northern Ireland, stood up in a hotel in London in front of 31 fellow amateur rugby players who had gathered to leave for South Africa under his leadership. The 34-year-old second row had been considered over the hill even on the previous tour, his fourth British Lions campaign, when they beat New Zealand in 1971. Now he was readying himself for an entirely different challenge, against a team for whom physical intimidation was considered a patriotic duty, a country the Lions had not beaten in a series for 78 years. He looked around the room, and feet shuffled as he began to speak. The players knew what was on his mind; it wasn't just rugby.

"I know there are pressures on you," McBride said, "but if you have any doubts, I would ask you to turn around and look behind you."

At the back of the room, there were two large open doors.

The captain continued: "Gentlemen, if you have any doubts about going on this tour, I want you to be big enough to stand up now and leave this room. Because you are no use to me, and you're no use to this team. There will be no stain on your character, no accusations if you do so, but you must be honest and committed. I've been in South Africa before and there's going to be a lot of physical intimidation, a lot of cheating. So if you're not up for a fight, there's the door."

The rugby was only part of the fight ahead of them. Harold Wilson's Labour government had sent a letter to the team asking them not to tour. Outside the team hotel, hundreds of demonstrators were milling noisily. They had come to express their anger that the Lions were giving succour, in their view, to a murderous regime dedicated to racial segregation, which had been a cornerstone of government policy for 26 years and had been ingrained in Boer thinking since the earliest days of settlement. They saw the tour not as a daunting sporting expedition but as a moral outrage, perpetrated by complacent pragmatists masquerading as gentlemen drinkers.

McBride did not share their view. He was an intelligent man, an Ulster Protestant who had seen the rise of paramilitary terrorism in his own country and the wrecking that year of the Sunningdale Agreement by unionists implacably opposed to power-sharing; he reckoned he could do without lectures on social cohesion. So, whether through expediency or conviction or both, McBride argued that a sports boycott of South Africa would not help the disenfranchised black majority - and the fact the itinerary included, for the first time, games against a black team and a coloured team, he considered an advance of sorts.

All 32 players, as well as tour manager Alun Thomas and coach Syd Millar, left the hotel together that day and boarded a plane to Johannesburg. They would be away from home for more than three months and they would return unbeaten. It would come to be regarded as the greatest of all rugby tours.

Ian McGeechan was in that room, a slight 27-year-old centre preparing for his first Lions campaign. Now he is the coach of the British and Irish Lions, charged with masterminding a return trip to South Africa as daunting in its own way as the '74 tour. Many things, though, have changed in 35 years. McGeechan has a squad of 37 at his disposal and they will play just 10 times, three of them Tests, in little over a month. He will be able to use five replacements in each match. They have the assistance of a hi-tech back-up team and all the comforts modern professional sport provides for its well-paid practitioners.

In 1974, the Lions were made up of teachers, a doctor, a member of the RAF, a steelworker, a solicitor, a banker, farmers; all sorts from all parts of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. And the numbers tell the story: 22 matches between 15 May and 27 July, all but the last won, and that a dubious draw. They crossed for 107 tries, conceding just 13. Substitutes could only be introduced after a doctor had been consulted, and they used only 16 players in the four Tests.

"We were all amateurs, we had other jobs, we went with a manager and a coach and 30 players. That was it," says McGeechan, who was a secondary school teacher at the time. "When we went into a place we would find a local doctor and a local physio and we had to go in the waiting rooms and queue if we wanted treatments. So it was very different from all the logistics that go into a tour now. You know, I had to train on my own before the tour, and I trained every day, with my wife holding a stopwatch, to make sure I would be as fit as anybody else in the party.

"The Lions was the closest you got to being professionals," he adds. "Because that was the only time when you woke up in the morning and the only thing on your mind was your rugby and the training."

Gareth Edwards, the son of a Welsh miner and the world's best scrum-half for most of the 1970s, worked for an engineering company. "The irony of it all, really, was that it was a contradiction of the amateur ethos," he says. "If my boss, Jack Hamer, hadn't supported me, and my family, I could not have gone on that tour. My wife gave birth on the Tuesday, and I was going away on the Friday for more than three months, you know?"

For Bobby Windsor, the Wales hooker, going on tour required his union representative to negotiate time off for him from the steelworks. "I was skint," he admits, "so I went on a 15-week tour with £40 in my pocket! I had to do some ducking and diving while I was away, I can tell you."

In the early matches, against provincial and select XVs, the Lions endured an intense examination of their physical and mental fortitude. For several decades, touring teams had suffered similarly. This time, the Lions would fight back, and the battle cry "99" would be written into rugby folklore. It was the simplest of strategies: "getting your retaliation in first", as the skipper put it. When a Lion was in trouble, his team-mates would hear the abbreviated call of "999", the phone number for emergency calls back home. The results were not pretty. And they worked.

"It was important that we showed that we would look after ourselves," says McGeechan. "But it wasn't used very often, it wasn't called every game. There was one very brutal game in Port Elizabeth against Eastern Province and there was a bit of a flare-up in the third Test more than any others. It was only if it was needed, and everybody understood why it was there."

The England prop Mike Burton remembers their resolve growing by the game, as McBride and Millar quietly spread confidence through the squad. "Willie John said before one game, against Transvaal at Ellis Park, 'I need him to be demoralised,'" he says. He was talking about the big Transvaal prop [Johan] Strauss, a real good'un. At the end of it, we won 23-15. As we're taking our boots off afterwards, Willie John leaned over to me and said, 'I see that man was done. His heart will never be mended. With the Springboks, something like that stays with them for ever.' He was right. We had broken a Springbok's heart."

When they got down to the serious business of the Test matches, the captain needed even fewer words than he had expended on the day they left London. As England's Fran Cotton, prop for all four Tests, recalls: "So it was to Cape Town for the first Test and we came down to the captain's room. It was half full and nobody was saying a word, not a word. It was probably another five minutes before everyone arrived, and still nobody's saying a word. Willie John arrives, nobody says a word. And then 20 minutes passed - 20 minutes! Well, you can imagine the atmosphere in the room, and he just looked at us all and said: 'Right then, we're ready,' and we got on the coach. It was the most unreal thing I've ever been through. But the tension that had built up was fantastic."

In a conflict of considerable physical intensity, the Lions won 12-3. Two weeks later, they did it again - even more convincingly, winning 28-9 at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria, five tries to nil, with JJ Williams rampant on the wing. It was one of the most comprehensive defeats ever inflicted on South Africa on home soil.

By the time the Lions reached Port Elizabeth for the third Test, the series was there for the taking. The Boks, cornered and humiliated, were ready for a fight, though. They had dropped all but five players and British journalists on tour say some of the new team looked "demented" when they ran on to the pitch. It would be remembered as the Battle of the Boet Erasmus Stadium, one of the dirtiest games in the history of the sport.

The Ireland centre Dick Milliken's description might have been lifted from an account of Rorke's Drift. "Me and McGeechan both felt we had never experienced such intensity on a rugby pitch as in the first 30 to 35 minutes of that game," he says. "South Africa came out all guns blazing. We all got stuck in, and we just spent the first half making tackles on people coming out from the ruck. And, after withstanding that for half an hour, the late Gordon Brown grabbed the ball short from a lineout and went over. It was as if the bubble had burst for the Springboks." The Lions led 7-3 at half-time, before playing their best rugby of the tour to win 26-9.

The match, however, is less famous for its play than its punch-ups. In one exchange, Brown clobbered his opposite number, Johan de Bruyn, so hard the Orange Free State man's glass eye flew out and landed in the mud. "So there we are, 30 players, plus the ref, on our hands and knees scrabbling about in the mire looking for this glass eye," recalled Brown, who died from Non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2001, aged 53. "Eventually, someone yells 'Eureka!' whereupon De Bruyn grabs it and plonks it straight back in the gaping hole in his face." (Shortly after Brown's death, De Bruyn presented his widow with the glass eye in a specially made trophy.)

When another fight broke out, the Wales full-back and orthopaedic surgeon, JPR Williams, ran fully 60 yards, in the spirit of "99", to deliver a right hook to second row Moaner van Heerden. "That's not something I'm proud of," Williams said later. "Funnily enough, I bumped into him on a train from London to Cardiff years later and he asked, 'Do you remember me?' I had to admit that I didn't and he just said that he had played against me in South Africa in 1974. We had a lovely chat."

Off the pitch, something wonderful was happening. As with this year's tour, the Lions arrival in 1974 was preceded by a general election in South Africa, a whites-only ballot then, which the National party, as ever, won comprehensively. Rugby was not a consuming interest of the black population at the time, but, game after game, they crammed into their demeaning, segregated pens - and cheered to a man for the Lions. Nelson Mandela, in the 10th year of his internment on Robben Island, heard the scores from sympathetic guards. He, too, wanted the Boks beaten.

It was a stirring sight, as Fergus Slattery, the lean Dublin flanker, recalls. "The whole experience was riddled with contradiction. You had in those days the sections cut off from the terraces, reserved for the Cape Coloureds and blacks, the non-whites. They turned up in their droves - and some of the areas they came from were grim - just to cheer us on. If they'd wanted to make a protest in any other way, they wouldn't have gone to the game at all. That didn't mean that they were directly trying to support the tour, of course."

"I thought by playing against two black teams we were helping," says Bobby Windsor. "And when one of those teams [the Leopards] scored a try against us [through the winger Charles Mgweba], and the Springboks hadn't scored a try [in the first two Tests], well, they went crazy. It was like they had crossed the line first."

Slattery, who had lived in West Africa when he was young, got away on his own between matches to see for himself what life was like in the townships. "I went in the dead of night on the train on my own with a journalist, from Durban up to Johannesburg. When we got there, the station master - in the middle of the night, mind you - had the red carpet out. He had all his station staff lined up, as a guard of honour for us. And there wasn't a white person in sight. So, here was another extraordinary contradiction. If there was resentment from the black community towards us, I never saw it. They didn't have to do that. That was something that the black station master decided for himself: there's a Lion on this train. Even when you weren't looking for it, there was so much goodwill towards us, no question."

The South African players knew that the black population were supporting the Lions. "We were very aware of that," says Morne du Plessis, the Springbok No 8 in 1974, who would later manage the 1995 World Cup-winning team. "Playing for Western Provinces on one Saturday, the coloured population would gather in the South Stand, as it used to be called, and their support was fanatical. The very next Saturday they would be cheering for the Lions. We understood what that was about and it surely troubled some of us."

"It was not a new thing," says prop Hannes Marais, captain for the last three Tests. "They supported all overseas sides at that time. That didn't upset us at all. I don't think the tour, however, contributed significantly to the dismantling of apartheid. The pressure inside as well as outside just grew and grew. It was just part of that, but not anything special."

It wasn't all blood, bruises and controversy. This was a rugby tour, after all. Many of the stories have gone into legend - there was McBride running through the hotel garden one night with an injured Phil Bennett on his back, chased by team-mates. The big man ducked under a branch - and almost decapitated the Welsh fly-half. One player cracked an ankle bone when he had to make a quick exit from the first-floor window of a new female acquaintance, and landed badly in the flower bed - then was chased from the premises by a snarling guard dog. But you will not get the player's name out of any of the Lions.

"Nobody ever broke ranks, wrote newspaper stories," says Mike Burton. "I do contracts for players now and I just looked at the contracts for this tour and it says they won't get their last £5,000 until well into October. So if they breach the contract, they won't get that last payment. It's quite clever. In our day, there was no need for that. There was a different culture. It was about honour and affection."

To build team spirit and prevent cliques, McBride and Millar made the players share a room with someone from a different country - a stark contrast to the 2005 Lions tour to New Zealand, where coach Clive Woodward was criticised for giving each player his own room. "They go and shoot paint at each other these days," says Stewart McKinney, the flanker from Co Tyrone, "and all these bonding things, but we had none of that. We would sing songs. At first everyone was very shy, they didn't want to get up and sing. Bobby Windsor got up and told a load of jokes, the funniest half hour of my life, and we just went from there. Willie John sang, Fergus Slattery sang, Billy Steele then sang, for the first time, Flower of Scotland, which became our tour song, way before the Scots took it up."

Drinking was very much part of rugby culture in those days and the players did not stint. "Syd [Millar] would call you over and say, 'What are you doing this afternoon?'" says Burton. "And you'd say, 'We're all going to have a drink.' 'Oh great,' he'd say, 'you can have as much as you want.' Then you'd be in one of the boys' bedrooms, a few cans of beer, telling stories, and he'd come around about five o'clock and say, 'Hi, are you all right, men? I just thought I'd let you know about tomorrow's training schedule. Starts at eight - and, by the way, we have a tough one.' That was his way."

When they broke off from rugby to have a week in Kruger National Park, the largest game reserve in South Africa, McKinney made sure he enjoyed himself. "Imagine that on a modern-day tour," he says. "What it really was, we were on the drink for a week. Today you'd be watching videos of the other team. We had every afternoon free to do your standard leisure things, fishing or shooting or wee cruises up the Zambezi. I'm not jealous of the players these days. Ours was a different game from a different era. I think we had a lot more enjoyment. I'm actually jealous of the guys who toured in the Fifties. They went by boat for a month there and back. They were gone for six months; that would've been my idea of heaven!"

The sense of togetherness among the players is obvious, even today. "The strength of the '74 tour was the unity of the whole squad," says Gareth Edwards. "I'm sure most of the lads would tell you that some of the hardest moments on that tour were training against, dare I say it, the B-side, which was a shadow side more accurately. They were as tough as any team we played.

"It's hard to put in so many words what is special about the Lions," he continues. "Suffice to say every player aspires to play for his country. Then you realise there is a further step to take. You read about it and, OK in later years, you're able to see these tours on TV. But we grew up reading about them, Cliff Morgan, Jeff Butterfield, Tony O'Reilly and all those guys on these long, long trips to the far side of the world. It's a gathering of the clans, isn't it. And there's the uncanny factor, too, that you battle and try to tear each other apart only weeks before and, all of a sudden, you are standing shoulder to shoulder against a common enemy a long way from home."

Andy Ripley, the England back row who did not play in a Test but shouted himself hoarse from the touchline, says, "I know it sounds strange, but in a way it was about love."

It was so nearly a perfect shutout for the team many call The Invincibles. In front of a crowd at Ellis Park said to be 80,000, but undoubtedly more, the Lions outscored South Africa in the fourth Test two tries to one, but were pegged back by three Jackie Snyman penalties. The score finished 13-13, and the South Africans had clawed back a scrap of pride. "We could've and should've won the last Test," Bobby Windsor says. "Fergie [Fergus Slattery] went over in the last minute and the ref disallowed it. When we spoke to the referee afterwards he said, 'Look boys, I have to live here.' Fair enough, I suppose."

Despite that contentious draw, the Springboks knew who were the better team. "We took a drubbing," says Morne du Plessis. "That 1974 team will for ever be held in separate esteem by South Africans; I would certainly rate them as the best team that I played against. Very strong forwards, with some of the best back-line players arguably the world ever saw. If you take JPR, Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett, put that into a pot in any day, believe me, those guys were special."

It is true the Lions had negligible impact on the system of apartheid - indeed, even though contact with South Africa was restricted after the Gleneagles Agreement in 1977, the Lions defied world opinion again when they returned to the republic in 1980 (Ireland followed in 1981 and England in 1984). While attitudes were slow to change in 1974, the Lions did make an impact at home, albeit one wrapped in hypocrisy.

"At the beginning of the tour," says Slattery, "the British government told the diplomatic corps in Pretoria not to get involved with us at all, to stay away from the games, not to host functions. Then we landed at Heathrow on the way back and there was an invitation to go to Downing Street. Where did it all change? What happened when we were out there? Apartheid certainly hadn't changed one little bit at that time. But the attitude of the British government had changed."

It seems so long ago, a time of innocence colliding with bigotry, of raw physical courage, and excellent rugby. Rugby means a lot to South Africans, black as well as white now. And Mandela will be cheering again on this tour- but not for the Lions this time.

Where are they now? The stars of '74

Phil Bennett

The Wales fly half scored the try of the '74 series in the second Test, and went on to captain the Lions in 1977 when they were beaten 3-1 by the All Blacks. He now works as a columnist and speaker.

Fran Cotton

After retiring from rugby in 1982, Cotton and fellow England international Steve Smith began a mail-order firm supplying rugby shirts. It grew into the multimillion-pound clothing company Cotton Traders, of which Cotton is still the managing director.

Gareth Edwards

The brilliant scrum-half retired in 1978, after helping Wales to a Five Nations grand slam. He took on Emlyn Hughes for four years as a team captain on the BBC's Question of Sport; today he is a commentator and a director at Cardiff Blues.

Fergus Slattery

The flanker played in all four Tests in South Africa. Five years later, he captained Ireland's most successful ever tour, to Australia. He retired with 61 caps. Now 60, he runs a Dublin estate agency.

Mike Burton

The prop played his last Test for England in 1978 and set up a successful hospitality and events management business. He will be leading a tour to South Africa this month; see mikeburton.com for more details.

Roger Uttley

The teacher played for England 23 times and went on to coach Will Carling's side to the final of the 1991 World Cup. In 1997 he became the England manager, before returning to teaching as director of PE at Harrow school. He retired last year.

Gordon Brown

Known as "Broon frae Troon", the Scotland second-row won 30 caps. He became a celebrated raconteur and after-dinner speaker thanks to his charismatic storytelling. He died from cancer in 2001.

Willie John McBride

McBride worked as a bank manager until 1994. The second-row was inspirational as the captain of '74, but experienced a different fate as manager of the '83 Lions, who were whitewashed in New Zealand.